Steps

You are not helpful at all. You missed the point.

No, but sorry, this is off topic. Since all have been said maybe Serif Staff can give a feedback to my suggestion and close discussion.

This seems like a bug to me, too.

Do you know if there is a related bug report in the other forum?

That this button even exists and the normal move tool does not the same thing is a huge usability flaw. I hope you can see that. This is likely one of the things you get used to and blind vor over time. One day you wake up and this feels natural because you saw it so often. With a fresh view of a newbie you see the problems. This is why we do hallway testing in software development because seeing the whole day the same thing makes you blind.

I found the easiest way is to drag them into from an open Explorer window. The place tool kind a su... err... does not fit in my workflow.

OMG! I found it out! It's this button that enabled moving with snapping. It's called "Edit content directly". Whatever that means... I does "moving with snapping". I don't know why this is a separate tool, what the label means and why it is not default behaviour, but I will use it. At Serif: Separate from that may suggestion to have a mode for the Picture Frame tool to enable behaviour like the photobook apps of Rossmann and Pixum shall remain. I still think this would be very useful.

@Seneca Yes! If I can't have the bevahiour from the Pixum and Rossmann software shown in the videos the snapping shown in the video is at least what I want. Can you please tell me precisly what options / preferrences have to be turned on and what tools I have to use to have the snapping like in your video? After understanding that I would like to ask Serif why this is not enabled by default.

@Seneca What I'm looking after and tried to demonstrate in the videos is what happens when you do not move the Picture Frame, but the Image inside the Picture Frame. If you watch again my videos you see how I move the image and I it always resides in the frame. This is what I want. If that is not possible a better snapping would help me here. Please see my video of Publisher above how I move the Image edge over the Picture Frame edge, but no snapping happens. This is what I at least would like to have. My main problem is after I moved the Image I have to correct it with moving by keyboard so that I do not have space between the upper edge of the Picture Frame and the Image. This space annoys me.

You kind of avoided my question. :-D

@fde101 @Seneca @dominik @haakoo Okay, I thought this trough... It would be a premium solution to me getting some kind of option for the Picture Frame or a second Picture Frame Tool that behaves like in the videos. Ok, I made that clear and I also see that InDesign has not such a feature. This makes it likely that Publisher will not get it, too. Since InDesign is the role model here. Do you guys think, even if InDesign doesn't do that, we can agree on this (what I consider to be a bare minimum)?: If the Picture Frame is a rectangle make the Image edges snap to the Picture Frame edges (when it comes close). You may configure that in the Snapping Manager and supress it as with Alt ("ignore snapping") as you are used to, but there is a option you can put an image layers left top edge exactly onto the left top edge of the bounding picture frame (for example). Do you think this should be possible or not? If not, please explain. I really start to think that everything InDesign cannot do should not be able in Publisher as if most people here indeed want to have an exact copy with nothing change (beside the price and subscription model). EDIT: Added video: ZRP3ByADCi.mp4

I see this as a question: Does Affinity want Publisher to be a easier, better & cheaper solution than InDesign? Or is the mission accomplished when it does the same thing as InDesign for a lower price? Will it be the next step in desktop publishing or just a close to identical copy? Time will answer that and right now this is not entirely clear to me. As I often said I see great potential to reach a lot of people including non-professionals. Think about how many people can use those photo book softwares. After doing quite advanced things with that I think there is not such a big gap as you mentioned. Of course photobook software does not have all that fancy stuff the frame text tool can do. This is were I see differences between what professionals and normal users need. But the basics should be done right. But after having made some suggestions and seeing the reactions (some also negative) and seeing other people making suggestions for something that Adobe products also do I think this software may not want to try something else or new and just wants to replace InDesign. So being closer to Adobe products is here perceived as better. If I suggest something InDesign also is not capable of there is a strong "no, we don't want, we don't need, stop talking" manner as if this would do anybody a harm to think about new ways.

Yes, you're right. This can only work with rectangles. I think it can be implemented the way that I set the Picture Frame a property to behave this way and then it can only be a rectangle. Maybe there could be a second type of Picture Frame that is always a rectangle, so there is no need to deal with other shaped Picture Frames. I'm not yet quite sure what would be the best user experience here. As seen in the video the image is scaled with the picture frame when the frame gets to big. When scaling the picture frame the image always scales with it if it needs to. I think this is perfectly fine behaviour. There is always a moment when I check out new software and encounter a new thing where I think either "yes, makes totally sense" or "oh, this is surprising". Seeing how picture frames behave in software of Rossmann and Pixum is a clear "yes, this is logical" moment. In contrast I really wonder how professionals don't get mad using InDesign, QXPress and Publisher with a behaviour that you always need to fine-tune the edges. I even did not find a snapping functionality of some kind to help there. It's just fine-grained work with the keyboard to fit it in there and this is what me really suprises. Maybe trough the years as professional you gone trough so much pain that you don't see it anymore, but as a new user to desktop publishing I'm really surprised nobody sees that as a problem. But somehow as a software developer I started to oversee the problems of Eclipse also and sometimes trainees give a hint. I account it to that.

EDIT: Changed videos to new versions. pixum.mp4 rossmann.mp4

Oh, yes, I tried that out... This works. Cool. Ok, that helps me to elaborate further what I suggest to Affinity: As long as linked files work the way they do now (being also embedded, just have a link for updates) enable the "Embed" button to let people recover from the "Missing" status. Of course, if keeping a copy of images in the document overall is considered a bug and the resource should vanish shortly after deleting the file on disk this is nothing to think about. I opened the topic with the knowledge that "Linked" really is "Embedded" + file change watching.

I hope it comes for embedded files then. The "Linked" aka "Watch for remote updates" thing was indeed a surprise for me. I wanted the document to be smaller and changed everything from "Embedded" to "Linked". As the file size did not change this was a "WTF" moment, yes. I'm on page 3 of my 50 page photobook and my document is already 150 MB in size. I wonder how big it will get if a pro designs a whole magazine with it.

It's okay. I recovered a copy of the resource doing it the long and hard way with the export function and going trough a lot of troubles. Consider my problem at hand resolved. But my strong suggestion to Affinity to think about a helpful "Export resource" function shall stay. Maybe staff reads and considers this, because I really think there is a easy to implement function just missing.

That's why I ask for an option, not change of standard behaviour. And I doubt somehow that you understood what I'm talking of when I have trouble to explain it to all the others. So your judgement is kind of uncalled for. But of course I know what you meant. I wanted to say "[...] that does it right in my opinion for this specific use case". Are you fine with that? :-)

Yes, I know. But printing services saw that possibility, too. Print is also low resolution, sometimes only grey scaled and has "preview" marks on it. They really don't want it. Before trying out Publishing Tools I have gone further and tried all kinds of community written scripts to PDF export a "CEWE Fotobuch" file. Does not work, forget it. So I'm not looking any more into using those propritary tools to achieve it, but have a clean, high-resolution PDF master file and let print that.

Thanks for trying to help, but Publisher currently has no "New from Clipboard" option. At least not in my Windows build. I do not own any Affinity products, so I'm limited here.

This works with more effort: I have to look up the original size of the embedded image and scale the layer to that first. Otherwise it will be exported as scaled currently (what I also would expect). After that I have to enlarge the page dimenstions if the image in original size does not fit because only the visible part is exported. Even if "clip to canvas" is active the image is cropped. You are trying to make fun of me, but I'm serious. Why do you even say such silly things as one might use APub as a backup application? Yeah, lets kick out Git and use this, yeah. Not funny. Since the document contains even "Linked" resources with all metadata and filename I see a use in exporting the resource back. This should be pretty easy to implement. If one day "Linked" is a real link to a file this will only be possible for embedded files. That's okay. And no, I have no "get-file-back" button on my computer. I usually don't need that because my NAS has nightly backups. I just accidently deleted the original file after importing it into the document and realized that there is no easy way to get it back. That's why I suggest to Affinity including this very easy function to just lets you export what you previously imported, because this can be a real use case to others. If you see no value in that I'm fine with that. Go ahead.

Nope, I use the Windows build. It does nothing on double click. What does the Mac version do? I can only double-click on the Image layer to scroll and zoom-to-fit (nice feature BTW), but there is also not a export function. I think the only way right now is to copy the layer to a new document, adjust the document dimensions to picture and save it as new PNG.

I will show you what I mean.

That's simple: I want a printable PDF for my digital archive. Other photobook software can only used to order real book prints. There is nowhere a PDF export. No digital copy. That's not the printers business model. Some allow ordering with InDesign PDFs... InDesign is too expensive. And Scribus is awful. A real usability nightmare. That's why I want to use Publisher. Does that make sense to you?

Cropping! Ok, I will make a video of a software that does it right...